Deal With the Devil: The FBI's Secret Thirty-Year Relationship With a Mafia Killer

by Peter Lance

  For example, in the 209 on the Peraino hit, Scarpa attributed the attack to the allegation that they “were dealing in narcotics as well as pornography.” But the family, under Joseph Colombo and Carmine Persico, had reaped millions from the distribution of Deep Throat alone, so the idea that they objected to smut defies belief. More important, as we’ll see in a series of 209s from the early to mid-1980s, DeVecchio repeatedly included statements from Scarpa indicating that the sale of drugs was forbidden within the Colombo family, when in fact the early Mafia prohibition had been abandoned with the explosive use of heroin and cocaine and Scarpa himself made millions from their sale.

  But an official at FBI Headquarters reading DeVecchio’s reports on “34” would never have known that. While Lin continued to assert that Scarpa had “furnished no information known to be false,” we can now state with certainty that many of the disclosures contained in DeVecchio’s 209s on Scarpa were outright lies. Did DeVecchio know them to be false? We can’t say for sure. Yet there isn’t a word in the hundreds of pages of teletypes and 209s from 1980 to 1992 even suggesting that the Killing Machine was also a drug czar, even though Scarpa fingered other competing capos for selling dope. And as we’re about to see, by the mid-1980s the Scarpa family was knee-deep in the cocaine trade.

  Chapter 14

  TWENTY GRAND A WEEK

  The following are excerpts from a series of FBI 209 memos filed by Supervisory Special Agent Lin DeVecchio on information passed to him about the Colombo crime family by Top Echelon Criminal Informant Gregory Scarpa Sr. between mid-July 1981 and July 1982. The memos reinforce “34’s” continuing insistence that drug sales were forbidden not only by the Mafia Commission but by the Colombo family in particular.

  July 14th, source advised that Colombo capo JOHN “IRISH” MATERA was “hit” during the past week on authorization from . . . CARMINE PERSICO as a result of a private deal involving narcotics.1

  July 28th, source advised that COLLIF DI PIETRO was “hit” as a result of his narcotics activities, particularly handling large quantities of cocaine. . . . The bosses of the five New York LCN families have recently reiterated their opposition to family members handling narcotics.2

  Sept. 17th, source advised that Gambino capo JOHN GOTTI is currently in hiding as a result of his handling narcotics. Source noted that a recent crackdown by the National Commission on LCN handling of narcotics resulted in the hits of numerous LCN members, and GOTTI apparently has word that his previous activities may result in his demise.3

  January 21, 1982, source advised that the recent attempted hit of may well have been the result of dealing in narcotics. The source noticed that it is quite possible that this work was done in part by Angelo Mazzola, who himself, was recently killed.4

  March 29, 1982, source . . . advised that Colombo member ANTHONY AUGELLO . . . is heavily involved in a large scale heroin distribution operation.5

  In these reports, Gregory Scarpa Sr. used his access to the FBI brass, through Lin DeVecchio, to paint a picture suggesting that drug dealing was still forbidden under the same Mafia rules he’d leaked to Hoover in 1962. But nothing could have been further from the truth. Not only were top bosses like Vito Genovese convicted of heroin trafficking as early as 1959, but from 1975 onward—five years before DeVecchio reopened Scarpa—Cosa Nostra was smuggling millions of dollars of China White heroin into the United States each year via the Mafia network known as the Pizza Connection, a $1.6 billion pipeline that wasn’t shut down until 1984, two years after that 209 on Anthony Augello.6

  All of this points to how, with the knowing or unknowing assistance of Lin DeVecchio, Scarpa was able to divert attention away from himself and incriminate mob leaders around him, just as he’d done in the early 1970s with Joseph Colombo and Joe Jr. As a result of Augello’s activities, and whatever investigative help the Bureau may have received from Greg Scarpa Sr. pursuant to the Title III wiretap, Little Allie Boy Persico, the boss’s son, was arrested on a heroin conspiracy charge. Although he was later acquitted,7 the younger Persico’s legal troubles had deadly consequences for Augello, who called his family from a pay phone to say good-bye and then shot himself.8

  Bricks of Coke

  But even as he fingered the competition, Greg Scarpa Sr. was raking in millions from his own narcotics activity. At the early-1990s trial of Colombo capo William “Wild Bill” Cutolo, Larry Mazza, Scarpa’s trusted right arm, testified that Greg stored bricks of cocaine in a file cabinet leading to a basement apartment, right up until he was arrested in 1992.9 Mazza went on to testify that Scarpa “encouraged his children to deal in narcotics” and even grew large quantities of marijuana at his New Jersey farm.10

  According to Mazza, from the mid-1980s on, Greg Scarpa’s sons, including Greg Jr., were “involved in the drug operation.”11 Mazza revealed more in his debriefings to FBI agents after he agreed to cooperate in 1994. He said that Scarpa had begun his drug-dealing activities by “taxing” existing dealers 25 percent of their take. It was Scarpa Sr.’s “belief,” said Mazza, “that the streets belonged to the Colombo Family and the drug dealers would be required to pay.” But then Senior “got greedy and decided that [his crew] should also be the source for the drugs.”12

  The caption on the sealed affidavit in the 1987 DEA case against Greg Jr. and the Wimpy Boys crew

  (Peter Lance)

  Former Assistant U.S. Attorney John Kroger, who later prosecuted Greg Scarpa Jr. for drug dealing, writes in his memoir Convictions that this led to more murders. In 1985, after initially taxing a marijuana dealer named Peter Crupi, whose “drug spot” was Staten Island College, Greg Jr. reportedly decided on a “hostile takeover” and Crupi was gunned down on August 2, 1985.13 Within weeks, according to Kroger, Scarpa’s crew was servicing a thousand customers a night with profits of $20,000 a week—from dime-bag pot sales alone.14 That represented an annual gross of $3,640,000. Eventually, writes Kroger, “charmed by the easy money, the crew diversified their product line, selling kilos of heroin and cocaine at wholesale prices to dealers all over the city.”15

  The final aspect of the takeover came with the murder of rival drug dealer Albert Nacha, twenty-two, whose body was found lying faceup in Clove Lakes Park on Staten Island on December 10.16 Clutching a five-dollar bag of pot in his hand, Nacha had been shot three times in the head and once in the chest at close range.17 According to Kroger, the message was clear: Scarpa’s crew now ran the dope business in that part of Staten Island.

  There wasn’t a word in any of Lin DeVecchio’s 209s or teletypes to the FBI during this period about the multimillion-dollar narcotics enterprise Greg Scarpa Sr. was running out of his Wimpy Boys social club headquarters.18 But that lapse pales in the face of the evidence that later surfaced suggesting that DeVecchio himself leaked information to “34,” warning him of an impending bust against Greg Jr. and his crew.

  By the fall of 1987, agents from the Drug Enforcement Administration (DEA), which had been tracking Greg Jr.’s movements independently, had developed such a formidable case against him that the U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of New York prepared an indictment against Junior and crew members Billy Meli, Kevin Granato, Nicky DeCarlo, and Cosmo Catanzano. Carmine Sessa, the former consigliere of the Colombo family, later testified that he’d sold cocaine for Greg Sr. and that the elder Scarpa not only had prior knowledge of the coming arrests, but that he’d told Sessa ahead of time “who was getting arrested.”19

  According to Meli, Greg Jr. met him outside the Wimpy Boys club and said that his father “had a friend who was an FBI agent.”20 He then pulled out a handwritten list of names, Meli said, containing all of the Wimpy Boys crew members who were about to get busted. Greg Jr. then told Meli that his father had learned from this “agent” that the DEA expected Catanzano to cooperate.

  Another member of Scarpa’s crew, Mario Parlagreco, told the FBI in 1994 that there were actually two lists of names. “Approximately three and a half to four months before his arrest . . .
Greg Scarpa Sr. warned him that the DEA was going to arrest Greg . . . Jr. and other members of [his] crew.”21 At the time of his initial contact with Senior, he said, Parlagreco’s name was not on that list. But a month later, Greg Sr. showed him a second list containing his name and that of his brother. Greg Jr. later testified under oath that this second list had been furnished by Lin DeVecchio.22

  Digging a Grave

  After receiving instructions that “no one was allowed to go on the lam to escape arrest,” Meli was then told that he should “be prepared to kill Catanzano” and that his body was to be buried “so it would not be found.” Meli later told Special Agent Howard Leadbetter II, who debriefed him, that Greg Jr. confirmed that “the decision had been made to kill Catanzano” and that Meli should start looking for a place to bury him.

  A few days later, Meli said, he and Kevin Granato found “an isolated spot off of Arthur Kill Road” and dug a grave. Mario Parlagreco also confessed to being in on the plot.23 Before they could execute the contract, though, everyone on the list but Greg Jr. got arrested.24 Tipped by his father’s “FBI agent” source, said Meli, Junior then took off and became a fugitive.

  Almost immediately, Assistant U.S. Attorney Valerie Caproni, who was supervising the prosecution of Junior’s crew, reached out to the FBI for help in locating him. But she later complained that “neither the EDNY, DEA nor the NYPD received any positive information back from the NY FBI’s Colombo LCN Squad regarding Scarpa’s crew.”25

  Lin DeVecchio was just about to take over that squad, and already the DEA had developed compelling evidence that Greg Scarpa Sr. was in regular contact with the FBI’s New York Office. According to Caproni, they’d set up a “pen register,” which tracked calls from a phone in Senior’s house to 26 Federal Plaza, where the Bureau’s NYO was now located. She later told FBI agents that “it was her belief that Scarpa Sr. was an FBI informant” and that “the NY FBI was not cooperating with the EDNY in locating Scarpa Jr. in view of the confidential relationship [he] had with the FBI.”26

  Greg Scarpa Jr. was finally located after his fugitive status was publicized on the Fox television series America’s Most Wanted. He’d been hiding out in Florida under the alias Salvatore Perri.27 Larry Mazza later told federal agents that he visited Greg Jr. in Florida, but following the Most Wanted exposure, his father had Junior moved to New Jersey. After hiding out with his wife, Maria, who used the alias Tracy Hill, the younger Scarpa was spotted at a motel in Lakewood, New Jersey, near the senior Scarpa’s horse farm. On August 29, 1988, Junior was arrested by DEA agents.28

  After Greg Jr. was taken into custody, Assistant U.S. Attorney Caproni met with Lin DeVecchio. She questioned him about “a number of homicides she believed Scarpa’s crew had committed.”29 But she insisted later that the information DeVecchio gave her was “of little prosecutive value.”30

  In a sworn statement in 1995 given to FBI agents from the Bureau’s Office of Professional Responsibility (OPR), during what amounted to an internal affairs investigation of his relationship with Greg Scarpa Sr., DeVecchio stated the following:

  “I emphatically denied then and today ever making any statement to Scarpa Sr. that I was aware that DEA was going to charge his son, or anybody else for drug violations.”31 In his recent book, when explaining why the FBI had been so slow to respond to Caproni’s requests for help in apprehending Greg Jr., Lin writes:

  As it turned out, the DEA referral to open a fugitive case on Gregory Jr. had been made to headquarters in Washington, DC, but no referral had been passed on to our New York fugitive squad. It had fallen through the cracks of the FBI and the DEA.

  Eventually, Greg Jr. was tried, convicted, and sentenced to twenty years in prison for racketeering and drug sales.32 In a sworn affirmation in April 1995, Caproni stated that “there is some reason to believe that . . . in 1987, DeVecchio told Scarpa that the DEA planned to arrest Gregory Scarpa Jr. and his crew. This information was conveyed in advance of the arrests and led to Scarpa Jr. becoming a fugitive. Further, Scarpa [Sr.] correctly knew that . . . Cosmo Catanzano was a ‘weak link,’ who might cooperate . . . if arrested.”33

  In fact, were it not for the DEA’s actions in arresting him, Catanzano may well have ended up in that grave by Arthur Kill Road.

  Watching Surveillance Tapes

  Without naming DeVecchio, Larry Mazza provided the Feds with further evidence that Greg Scarpa Sr. had been tipped to the DEA bust by a law enforcement source. He confessed that “sometime in 1987 . . . before the DEA arrests,” he was at the home Greg Sr. shared with Linda Schiro and they were watching official surveillance videos taken outside the Wimpy Boys social club. Mazza told the Feds he was “surprised that Scarpa Sr. had these tapes and had no idea how he received them.” But in a 2004 hearing Greg Jr. said under oath that his father “obtained [the video] from Agent DeVecchio.”34

  According to Mario Parlagreco: “Based on a discussion with his law enforcement ‘guy,’ [Greg Sr.] believed there was a bug in the club.” After ordering Carmine Sessa to sweep the premises, a rectangular-shaped black bug was found. After that, Parlagreco said, “Scarpa Sr. asked everybody to come outside of Wimpy’s and told them not to do business in Wimpy’s because of the location of the bug.”35

  How did Scarpa become aware of the bugs? In his book Convictions, former federal prosecutor John Kroger names Lin DeVecchio as the source. Kroger writes that DeVecchio “told Senior [that] the Wimpy Boys had been bugged, foiling a New York State investigation in the process.”36

  “In all agent-informant relationships,” Kroger writes, “the government is supposed to ensure that information flows in only one direction, from the informant to the ‘controlling agent.’ According to several witnesses from the Mafia and the FBI, DeVecchio ignored this basic rule. In the mid 1980’s, according to these witnesses, he began to disclose confidential law enforcement information to Gregory Scarpa Sr.”37

  Kroger insists that “DeVecchio’s motives, at least initially, were sound,” noting that “in the 1980’s Mafia informants were hard to come by, so having Senior on the payroll was a huge break.” But he concludes that “over time . . . DeVecchio seems to have lost his moral bearings.”38

  In his own book, while steadfastly denying that he ever leaked any FBI intelligence to Scarpa, Lin DeVecchio nonetheless plays down the significance of the Scarpa drug operation, using commentary from retired SSA Chris Mattiace, who ran the Colombo Squad before him, to assess the significance of the DEA case.

  The Dead-End Kids

  “What were they involved in?” writes Mattiace, discussing the Wimpy Boys crew. “Shaking down kids who sold pot and coke to other kids! We had absolutely no interest in such a case. Greg Scarpa himself was not big enough for our interests at the time, much less his son and the Dead End Kids. . . . I didn’t know that Scarpa was a source for anyone, much less Lin. Lin didn’t get my Colombo squad until Gregory Jr. was already more than two months gone.”39

  But one FBI agent who worked under Mattiace had a different recollection when interviewed by agents during that OPR investigation into whether DeVecchio had crossed the line and leaked intel to Scarpa.

  Special Agent Michael Tabman stated, “In . . . February of 1987, I was assigned to work for SSA Christopher Mattiace. . . . I was assigned to investigate the Scarpa crew.” Later that year Tabman was present at a meeting at the DEA office in Manhattan when he learned that their investigation was nearing completion. According to Tabman, the “arrest of members of the Scarpa crew, including Gregory Scarpa Jr.[,] was imminent.”40

  Tabman went on to say that in “November or December of 1987 . . . the Mattiace squad was absorbed into SSA Lindley DeVecchio’s squad.” During this time, he recalled “having discussions with SSA DeVecchio regarding the Scarpa crew and the DEA case.”41 Tabman remembered DeVecchio “being very interested in this matter.” So, despite Mattiace’s comments in DeVecchio’s book—that his squad had “absolutely no interest” in the investigation—Tabman’s a
ccount suggests that DeVecchio was at least aware that Gregory Jr. was a DEA target. Further, Mattiace’s admission that he knew about Scarpa’s marijuana operation seems to contradict DeVecchio’s sworn OPR statement. In that document, echoing the earlier 209s he sent to Washington, DeVecchio made this affirmative statement: “I had no idea that Scarpa Sr. or Scarpa Jr. were involved in drug distribution. It was my understanding the Colombo Family had a disdain for drugs.”42

  “In that single statement,” says former FBI agent Dan Vogel, “Lin DeVecchio raises a serious question about his credibility. Given what’s known about Scarpa’s extensive drug operation, it defies belief that the supervisory special agent who was supposed to ‘control’ him didn’t know he was committing these crimes—especially when you look at the statement of Chris Mattiace, who admitted knowing about the Staten Island College operation. How do you gross $70K a week under the watchful eye of your contacting agent and have him miss that?”43

  As to Mattiace’s characterization of the Staten Island drug operation as a kind of “Dead End Kids” enterprise, Tabman underscored the lethal nature of it in his OPR statement:

  We became involved in the investigation in a series of murders and we did a flow chart regarding the relationship of the decedents. These relationships all involved Gregory Scarpa Jr. It seemed as though each time we identified a potential subject in these cases that subject was found deceased after identification. I remember this occurring on approximately three occasions, one in particular involving a blond haired subject, who was found deceased the day after we determined his identity.44